NASA Opens Inquiry Into Drunken-Flying Reports

Saturday

Jul 28, 2007 at 5:29 AM

Officials say they have asked NASA’s safety chief to interview astronauts, flight surgeons and others to determine whether the agency has an alcohol problem.

WASHINGTON, July 27 — NASA is investigating reports that some astronauts may have flown while drunk, and will develop a formal code of conduct for the astronaut corps, officials of the agency said Friday.

With Congressional committees already promising hearings on alcohol use and other health issues, the officials said they had asked NASA’s safety chief, Bryan D. O’Connor, to interview astronauts, flight surgeons and others to determine whether the agency had an alcohol problem.

NASA has come under embarrassing scrutiny since the allegations were made public on Thursday, in a report by the magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology about the findings of an independent eight-member panel looking into astronaut health issues. The panel, of medical, legal and psychiatric experts, interviewed 14 astronauts, 5 of their family members and 8 flight surgeons.

On Friday, the panel released some details of the drinking allegations, but emphasized that they were anecdotal and had not been corroborated.

In one incident, an astronaut was said to have been impaired by alcohol before a planned shuttle liftoff that was delayed by mechanical problems. Afterward, when crew members wanted to fly their T-38 training jets from Florida back home to Houston, a colleague questioned the same astronaut’s ability to fly, said the panel’s chairman, Col. Richard E. Bachmann Jr., a physician who commands the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine.

In another account, an astronaut flying to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft became drunk before the trip.

No names or dates were given for either incident.

The committee’s review of physical and psychological health issues affecting astronauts stemmed from the arrest of an astronaut, Capt. Lisa M. Nowak, a naval officer, after she confronted a romantic rival last February in the parking lot at Orlando International Airport. Captain Nowak was subsequently discharged from NASA and faces charges of assault and attempted kidnapping.

At a news conference here Friday, the panel’s chairman, Colonel Bachmann, said via telephone hookup that the reason the anecdotal references to the drinking incidents were included in the report that the panel delivered to NASA was not to suggest that the agency necessarily had an alcohol problem, but to emphasize the importance of heeding flight surgeons.

The panel did not ask for details of the accounts, including reports of heavy alcohol use by astronauts immediately before flights, and does not know how any such episodes were resolved, he said.

“In none of these can we say factually they did or did not occur,” he continued, adding that the panel’s mission had been not to investigate allegations but to point out that health and safety concerns might have been ignored.

Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA and military flight surgeon whose wife, Laurel Salton Clark, died in the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, said he was surprised at the lack of factual substantiation in the report.

But if an astronaut did actually board and fly a T-38 jet while intoxicated, “that’s a big deal,” he said, reflecting a “blatant disregard for safety.” That in turn would hark back to the findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the presidential commission that investigated the earlier Challenger explosion. Both concluded that a culture of playing down safety issues had had a part in the disasters.

Dr. Sandra A. Yerkes, a retired Navy captain and flight surgeon who was a member of the astronaut health panel, said she and her colleagues had been concerned that the alcohol allegations might be sensationalized.

“We thought we had couched it properly,” she said of the references to drinking, which involved five paragraphs of the panel’s 12-page report. “Perhaps it was naïve of the committee to put it in there.”

In response to the report, NASA officials said astronauts would be asked to draft a code of conduct to detail what behavior was expected from members of the agency.

Ellen Ochoa, director of flight crew operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said NASA policy had long prohibited drinking in the 12 hours before an astronaut flies a training jet — the so-called “12-hour bottle-to-throttle rule.”

This policy has also unofficially applied to spaceflights, she said, but from now on will formally apply.

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